Ranking Beliefs. Power Dynamics Within Religious and Religious-Like Discourse

Religion and religious-like behaviours are generally represented as designators of group identity by virtue of their ability to bind subjects in a centralized network of rhetorically distributed beliefs. The influence of religion on secular politics is often explained through its ability to construct a sense of identity by projecting an Other (mostly connotated as undesirable) in relation to which the Self (usually understood as the reservoir of goodness) is continuously defined. According to other strands of literature, religious belief draws authority from tradition and is only accessed through a ‘chain of learning’ and, as such, passed on, after tailoring, as a specific set of rules and patterns of subjective decision-making processes. Through these secularly-tinted lenses, religion becomes little more than an outdated instrument of power, a form of ‘moral coercion’ that ultimately tethers subjects through ‘micropolitics’ and ‘symbolic violence’. However, an increasing number of events and contemporary discourses show that this is theoretically and empirically questionable. While religious-like behaviours were, for much of the 20th and 21st century, deemed to be permanently idle in an irreversibly secular society, more and more literature concerned with questions of identity and power seems to show the contrary. It is becoming increasingly clear that the negotiation between secular views and religious thinking is not only revived, but it has never ceased to influence society. As such, the ideational clashes between religious discourse and lay ideology is deemed to be engaged in dialectics of power. As part of this debate, I argue for an analysis of the ideational dialectics that take place within religious discourse (or religious groups) in order to understand the conflicts and imbrications between the religious and the secular (or between distinct religions). Given that religious discourse is bounded by symbolic constants and, as such, it is allowed minimal internal variation, I argue for looking at ideational conflict within religious and religious-like discourse through a set of semantical indicators, such as religious symbols, rituals, and places of worship, to spell out more general ideological dialectics, underpinning contemporary trends in the religion-politics nexus. I do this in three steps. First, by applying Spohn’s ‘ranking theory’ to the case-study event of the 2016 Orthodox Council, I argue that, contrary to the perceived stability of religion, it is specific to religious discourse to host a variety of contradicting beliefs that often are the object of within-group negotiation. Second, I aim to show that certain such ‘negotiations’ have more or less predictable outcomes based on doxastic coherence. Finally, by drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Gadamer and Habermas, I aim to sketch a more general framework to be used in assessing the negotiation between beliefs of any kind, including fake news, propaganda and patterns of thought nested through social media.